The violence in Amsterdam last night has been widely described as a pogrom against Jews. This is not only misleading but politically dangerous. A thread.
As a scholar of pogroms, I have been struck by the way the word 'pogrom' has been used over the last year to describe Jewish experiences in the here and now.
In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, there was a 900% increase in search volume for the word ‘pogrom’. In the last 24h, a 650% increase.
The word 'pogrom' evokes histories that are etched in Jewish collective memory. Clearly, many are reaching for it as a way to make sense of recent events. But it is wrong and misleading.
The word pogrom, derived from the Russian verb gromit – to plunder, destroy – passed into common usage in the English language in the early 20th century as news spread of atrocities carried out against Jews in Imperial Russia.
The pogroms were violent acts by sections of the majority population against a racialised minority lacking in rights or state protection. The intention was to keep that minority 'in their place'.
In the Civil War of 1917-1921, more than 100,000 Jews were murdered in what was then the most ferocious wave of antisemitic violence in modern Jewish history. quest-cdecjournal.it/?issue=15&ref=…
There is a wealth of scholarship on pogroms. What are the prevailing definitions? For historian Hans Rogger, pogroms occur in a context in which the mechanisms of long-term structural exploitation of a minority population begin to be relaxed or challenged.
For David Engel, pogroms involve "collective violent applications of force by members of what perpetrators believed to be a higher-ranking ethnic or religious group against members of what they considered a lower-ranking or subaltern group”
In other words: pogroms occurred against Jews in regions of Europe where they were structurally discriminated against, where laws prohibiting their full participation in civic and political life, and where Jews were deemed to be carriers of alien values and ideology.
Describing the violence in Amsterdam last night as a pogrom is wrongheaded for four reasons. First, from the footage I have seen, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were attacked not as Jews but as Israelis. The word pogrom, then, is doing the work of conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
Second, earlier in the day Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were filmed shouting “Finish the Arabs! We’re going to win!”. A Palestinian flag was set on fire. A taxi driver attacked. This context has been widely overlooked. A pogrom involves victims and perpetrators; this was not a pogrom.
Third, describing the violence of last night as a pogrom encourages us to ignore the vast difference between the status of Jews in Europe a century ago and their place in Israel today where they constitute the majority in a state boasting one of the world’s most formidable armies
The analogy of the pogrom leads us to imagine a world populated in perpetuity by beleaguered Jews and their powerful enemies. The reality today is different, as Israel’s devastating war on Gaza shows, a war described by respected scholars of the Holocaust as a genocide.
Fourth, the word 'pogrom' has been shamefully put in the service of racist dog-whistling. Instead of combatting antisemitism, all this does is further entrench racism.
The word 'pogrom' is not only ill-suited to the task of explaining last night, it does a disservice to Jewish history and prevents us from comprehending the multiple atrocities being carried out in the here and now.
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Earlier today Zelensky did an interview with 4 Russian journalists. One of them is TV Dozhd' editor Tikhon Dzyadko (underneath Zelensky in the image below). Dzyadko's great-grandfather was a guy called Tsvi Fridliand. A niche THREAD for those interested in Russian history.
Born in Minsk in 1896, Fridliand was a leading member of Poalei Zion - a Jewish socialist party. In 1917 he led a left fraction of the party that supported the Bolsheviks. During the October Revolution he was active among the Red Guards, arming workers to seize the Winter Palace
The Russian invasion has revealed a quiet but no less extraordinary transformation in Ukrainian Jewish life (thread).
A century ago, Ukraine was the epicentre of antisemitism. This was the age of the pogrom, the most violent chapter in pre-Holocaust modern Jewish history. Over 100,000 Jews were murdered, many by Ukrainian nationalists. It was the Red Army that brought the violence to a halt.
All the place names you are hearing in the news right now – Kyiv, Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Zhytomyr, Odesa, Uman – were sites of major acts of anti-Jewish violence. Gomel, where today’s ‘talks’ will take place, can be added to that list: a devastating pogrom occurred there in 1903.
Socialist and Communist alternatives to the Olympic Games – THREAD
Between 1925 and 1937 a series of Workers’ Olympiads were held in Europe. Organised by the Socialist Workers’ Sport International, the Worker’s Olympiads presented an alternative to what it called the ‘bourgeois’ Olympics.
The Workers’ Olympiads were huge, and certainly much larger than the ‘bourgeois’ Olympics: around 150,000 spectators attended the first socialist games in Frankfurt in 1925, where the world record was broken for the women’s 100m relay.
Is antisemitism within Labour 'exaggerated'? A short thread based on work with David Feldman (@PearsInstitute) and Ben Gidley (@bengidley) 1/18
Conflation and confusion abound in this debate. We need to distinguish a) public perception of the issue from b) the number of known antisemitism cases in the Party from c) the extent of antisemitism within Labour and society more generally 2/18
What do we know about a) public perception? In a Survation poll in March 2018, a thousand people were asked “Have you seen or heard anything about accusations of antisemitism (hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people) made against members of the Labour Party?” 3/18
Our article for The Political Quarterly (@po_qu) on antisemitism has just been published. Co-written by Ben Gidley (@bengidley), me and David Feldman (@PearsInstitute), we argue that Labour’s antisemitism crisis has been misunderstood. A thread (1/13). onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…
In an otherwise bitter dispute, there is one unnoticed area of consensus: Labour’s friends and enemies agree the problem is about the number of antisemites in the party's ranks. But the number of antisemites is not the same thing as the spread of antisemitic attitudes in society.
By drawing on existing attitudinal data towards British Jews from @jprinstitute and @CST_UK, our article points to the need to rethink a contentious debate.